by Jo Baker
When the three of them came down to swallow a cup of tea and eat some bread and cheese, he brought the smell of carpentry; of wood, beeswax, and linseed oil. Mr. Moore went back to his work; Sammy Tate went home. Dad stayed downstairs and shook out a ragged paper. I dithered about, tidying things away. Then Thomas called for me.
He stood on the top step, his face red, his eyes flickering from the step to my face and then beyond me into the house, then back to the step again. His sister Martha smiled up encouragingly from the street. She had her arm linked through her husband Gerard’s arm; he was gazing down the village street, his mind on the shot-put or the wrestling. Thomas cleared his throat.
“Would you like to come to the sports with us?” he said.
My dad yelled from his seat to know what was going on, so I told him Thomas was there, and Thomas called past me to my dad and said he wanted to take me down to the sports. Dad told me I was to go and get my bonnet on. It was easier to go than to argue with all that.
I walked down to the water meadow with Thomas and his sister and her husband, trying not to care what it might look like. I talked to Martha. Thomas walked silently at my side in his Sunday coat. I noticed the way his long legs swung his clogs out ahead of him, like plumb lines. His trousers were too short for him, and showed the cuff of his clogs, an inch of worsted wool sock.
They came from all directions; along the riverside paths from Newton and Hornby, down the hill from Docker and Storrs, wading through the ford from Melling and Wrayton, gathering on the water meadow to walk among the stalls and games and wait the start of the sports.
When Mr. Aitken announced that the wrestling was to begin, the men crowded close to the roped-off circle, almost screening it from view; Martha and I climbed the bank to watch from a suitable distance with the other women. A Gressingham man won the first bout. Then Thomas was in the ring, stripped to the waist, being slapped on the back, having his hand shaken, looking very ill at ease. I glanced over at Martha: she smiled at me. Thomas looked disastrously vulnerable; his blue-white skin, the dark scattering of hair across his chest, the pink-brown darkness of his face and neck and hands. He looked somehow more than naked: he looked as if he’d been skinned. His opponent pushed in through the crowds. I recognized him as one of the Huddle-stones from Cawood: a big square meaty man in his middle years; I didn’t see his face. Mr. Aitken dropped his arm, and the bout began. I glanced at Martha again: her smile was uneasy. I had been brought here, to be shown this.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “Excuse me.”
I turned away, and picked my way down the bank, passing through the crowds; I walked along the hedgerows, looking at the speedwell, the stitchwort and lady’s mantle, and trying not to think of Martha’s look, so full of anticipation and anxiety, and not about the fight. I stayed away till the noise and shouting had died down.
Thomas found me later. There was blood on his neck; his ear had been torn. It made me shudder to look at it. He brought me to the tea tent, and sat me down at a quieter end of one of the long benches, and fetched me a cup of tea. It was noisy in there, and airless. He had to shout to speak to me: he’d won his bout, he was going to be in the second round. I could smell the sourness of his body. He was red with awkward pride. I said I was pleased for him, and that I was tired, and was thinking about going home soon. He seemed to falter a moment, and there was a look about him again, almost angry, not sure if he’d been given cause to be. Then he gathered himself, and said that he would walk back with me.
“There’s no need,” I said. “You’ll miss the bout.”
“Doesn’t matter.”
I looked down at my hands resting on the white tablecloth. Two dozen different conversations were continuing loudly and close by, competing with the rattle and hiss of tea making, the sounds of eating and drinking. The air was full of steam and sweat and the smell of boiled ham and teacakes and canvas and crushed grass. Pinpricks of light sheered in where the canvas had been holed, like stars; I remember thinking, stars are holes in the sky, where the light of heaven breaks through. I remember thinking of Thomas’s red-brown face and hands, the blue-white of his body, that scatter of dark hair. Mr. Aitken leaned in through the open flap of the doorway, and called out that the second round of wrestling would be starting shortly, and I looked up and gave Thomas a quick smile.
“Go on,” I said. “Good luck.”
“Lizzy,” he said.
“I’m just so tired,” I shook my head, and the way he looked at me made me begin to hope that he understood me more fully than I was able to say. I got up, and he sat there still at the trestle-table, and let me go. I slipped out of the tent and away from the crowds, the noise. I left the water meadow, and passed through the gate into the hay meadow. The ground was dry and hard, the evening air whisked with swallows. I could hear the shouts of the men behind me as the wrestling began again, and the calls of the birds in the hedgerows, the rustling of small creatures. I climbed up the wash-house lane, my face cooling in the evening air.
I slipped off my clogs and bonnet in the dark empty kitchen. I remember the feeling; it was as if all sensation was suspended. I remember thinking, I’ll not worry about this now; I’ll worry about it afterwards. There had been a light burning in the upstairs room; a light to read by as the daylight faded. I picked up my chapbook, my Pilgrim’s Progress, and I climbed the stairs.
The door stood ajar. My fingers pressed against the pale wood. The door swung softly open. I saw the bookcase. He had already shelved his books, stacked newspapers and journals on a low shelf. I crossed the room and rested my hand on the wood. Soft-napped, with a cool iron hardness underneath, it seemed like something formed by nature, not by man. I lifted my hand away, and there was wood dust on my fingertips. It made my skin prickle.
“It’s beautiful,” I said, as I turned around to where he was.
He was sitting at a table on the far side of the room; the door had screened him as I came in. The table and chairs were new to the household; he must have brought them in that evening. A wax candle was dripping in one of our pewter candlesticks. A book lay open in front of him. The room smelt of oak and beeswax, and was warm with the glow of candlelight. His dark eyes caught a gleam.
“You made this,” I said.
He didn’t speak, he just looked back at me.
“It’s beautiful,” I said again.
He cleared his throat. “Thank you.”
He stood up, pushing his chair back from the table and came over to me, his leather soles quiet on the wooden floor.
I said it again, and shook my head; “But you made this.”
“Yes. But you make things all the time; you never stop.”
“It’s not the same. I make the tea and make baskets and I make things clean and neat, but none of it lasts, not beyond the use of it; it gets eaten, it gets dirty, if it’s a basket it gets sold and I start all over again.” I shook my head again. “But this, this is different. There used to be nothing there, and now there’s something. And it looks as though it could stand here forever.”
He smiled, but I turned to watch my fingertip slip across the smoothness of the wood. It was a strange feeling, the softness of the surface, the iron hardness beneath. I heard his breath as he drew it.
“There’s no such thing as forever,” he said. “What are you doing here?”
I was suddenly aware of myself, standing there, uninvited, with wood dust on my fingers. If ever there were cause for him to mock me, this was it, but his expression was serious and sober. He gestured to the chapbook tucked under my arm, my Pilgrim’s Progress.
“Have you brought something for me to see?”
His voice was barely above a breath. Someone could come home at any moment, and find me alone with him, at night, in his room; I had not considered this. It made me feel more nervous to realize that he had.
“I wanted to ask you,” I said, and it all came pouring out, without pause for reflection. “I wanted to know. My chapbook of Robinson C
rusoe, and your book about the same man. I don’t understand at all. They’re the same thing, but not quite, and the book is so much bigger, has so much more of the island in it, more words, more thinking. I looked at my Pilgrim’s Progress again—” I felt my voice thicken with the beginning of ridiculous, foolish tears. “I looked at it again; I thought I knew it back-to-front, but I read the title properly, I read the Apology properly for the first time ever. It seems, it seems that both books, the Progress and the Crusoe book: I don’t think they’re true.”
He reached out, and for a moment I thought he was going to touch me, to just rest a hand on my waist, but instead he took hold of the Progress, which I was holding pressed with the chapbook between my arm and my side. I loosened my grip, let the book slip away and took the chapbook in my own hand. His practised fingers opened the book’s cover and leafed through the pages.
“ ‘Read my fancies,’ ” I said, craning my head to look at the words. “It says fancies. And similitude; I think that means a pretence, a deceit, doesn’t it?”
He pressed his lips together, tilted his head. “Also counterpart, where one thing seems an echo of another; as in music, where a melody returns again in the same piece, and is familiar, but not the same, is perhaps rendered in different instruments, in a different key.”
He set the book down on an empty shelf, reached up and took down his Robinson Crusoe. He handed it to me. “Would you read the title page for me, Elizabeth?”
My name on his lips. It startled me, made me glance at him. He nodded to the book, waiting for me to read, so I opened it, turned the leaves, found the title page, and I read it to myself.
“So who’s Mr. Defoe?” I asked. “What’s he got to do with it?”
“Mr. Defoe,” Mr. Moore said, “wrote the book.”
“He isn’t mentioned in the chapbook,” I said, lifting it up. “Why does it say that Robinson wrote it?”
“It’s a device,” Mr. Moore said, “a convention. There was no Mr. Crusoe, at least, not in the way you might have imagined. There was a sailor, one Alexander Selkirk, who was shipwrecked in the South Seas. Defoe based the book on his travails. May I?”
He took the chapbook from my hand. He examined the cover, the woodcut of Robinson with his goatskin umbrella.
“So it’s not true,” I said. “None of it was true?”
“It’s fiction. So is your Pilgrim’s Progress. Did you really think there was a city called Destruction?” His tone was kind. I didn’t mind it.
“For all I know,” I said, “there might be half a dozen.”
He smiled; there was something very pleasant about his face when he smiled; his brows seemed to clear, his eyes to soften, and I found myself wondering about the young man that he had been; if at nineteen, at twenty, his brow would have been always unfurrowed, his gaze as open and clear as that. He handed the chapbook to me and went back to his seat. He touched the book that he had been reading, gentling the page flat.
I hesitated, watching him, then went over to the table, and stood there, not knowing what to say. The chair beside him scraped back from the table; he had pushed it out with a foot. He glanced up at me, the candle burning clear and warm, the open pages of his book creamy gold between us. He nodded towards the seat.
“I only know what I learned at school,” I said.
“I doubt it,” he said. “Sit down.”
I slid onto the chair.
“What did they teach you?” he asked.
“To read the Gospels. I’ve always read everything the way I was taught, as if it were gospel truth. I never knew that books could lie.”
For a moment he did not reply, and the words seemed to hang in the air like a bell-chime, unanswered, and I thought of what Reverend Wolfenden had said, about Mr. Moore being neither of the church or of the chapel, and being a Chartist and an agitator and a viper.
I leaned forward. “Will you tell me, please, will you explain? I mean, tell me the nature of what I have read. What is truth, and what is lies, and what pretence?”
In the candlelight his eyes were dark and wet and peaty, and his skin lined and tired and weather-worn. He looked at me, leaning back. Then he grinned, shook his head.
“That’s a good question,” he said.
“Is it?”
“It’s practically unanswerable.”
“How can it be?”
“Well truth and lies and pretence; it’s a question about how we can understand the world. And there are so many ways of understanding the world. There’s natural science and that’s an attempt to describe the physical world as it is, ever since Aristotle and the crab; but how can you describe the world as is when you only have your partial and imperfect senses to guide you, and an imprecise and mutable language to express what you have seen, and a mind that may not, after all, be adequate to the task? And then there’s history and that has all the attendant problems of science but with the complicating coda that it describes the world as it was not as it is, and there’s politics, which is describing the world as it could or ought to be or ought not to be, and is driven by faction more than anything else. And then there’s philosophy, which some would say is the only way we can understand anything, but leads, I have found, more to an understanding that nothing can be perfectly known in this imperfect world, which is how I feel about science, if you remember. But you’ve been reading fiction, which, it seems to me, when run through as it is in both books with a strong vein of religion, is an attempt to pretend that it can.”
I shook my head to clear it. “What can what?”
“Sorry. That something can indeed be perfectly understood in this imperfect world.”
I was dazed with it. I felt as though I had walked into a haberdasher’s shop, like the one that I had once seen into when I was a girl, and we were taken to Lancaster for a fair. But instead of just peering in the window and admiring the ribbons, I was stepping through the door, passing the drawers of buttons and hooks, the rails of laces and braids; going further in, moving between bolts of glowing velvet and swathes of brocade, bemused and almost gawping with delight.
“What do you do here, when you have the meetings? Do you talk to them like this?”
“You don’t know what the meetings are for?”
“No one told me.”
He raised his eyebrows.
“Really,” I said. “I didn’t even know the room was to be let until the evening you arrived.”
There was a moment’s silence. His expression was muted somehow, but when he spoke, he spoke briskly.
“I’m setting up a reading room,” he said. “With your father’s permission, of course; he adds a little to my lodgings bill for the increased wear and tear and inconvenience. I have my books and papers to lend, and others bring theirs to exchange. Sometimes I talk on a subject. Others will take their turn later; we will have talks on natural science, history, geography, when the men feel easy with the idea.” He paused again. “No one told you?”
“No.”
He nodded. “You must resent me.”
“No—”
“I didn’t fully understand the nature of the arrangement when I agreed it with your father. I think of you at night, sometimes; sleeping on the floor. I mean, are you sufficiently comfortable?”
I glanced up at him; his gaze was turned towards his book, as if he were half-reading a line there.
“Perfectly.”
“You are young, I suppose. You sleep soundly.”
“I’m nineteen,” I said, my cheeks burning.
He nodded, though I had not meant it in agreement. There was a silence, and it seemed strangely coloured, as if the situation had rendered the words unpredictably powerful. I retraced our steps, looking for a moment that I could return to, a point before words became slippery and stronger than they’d seemed.
“Everyone that comes, they must bring books to exchange?” I asked. I knew my father didn’t; I suspected that Thomas couldn’t, unless he borrowed them off someone else bef
orehand.
“Many of them do,” Mr. Moore said, his voice sounding deliberately lighter. “There are some books that everybody has, that are not worth exchanging, such as the Progress. We have put together a subscription for the Penny Cyclopaedia.”
I’d walked that road with Christian so many times, and I’d always thought it was a solitary journey, but there’d been a horde of us, all the old farmers and cowmen and ostlers that came to the meetings: everyone had the Pilgrim’s Progress.
“Can I come?” I asked. I knew even as I spoke what his answer would be.
“If a woman were to arrange something—to find a place—it’s not for me to do; there would be complaints, inquiries, noise; I am trying to avoid noise.”
He closed his book over, pushed it to one side. His hands lay loosely curled on the tabletop. I could see that fine white scar down the back of his thumb.
“There is no one to do it.”
“Any woman who came to our meetings would be—”
“I would come.”
His hand lay a finger’s breadth from mine; I could just lift a finger, and touch his skin.
“Do you want this, then? Do you really want it so much?”
I looked up at his face, his eyes shadowed, his skin warm in the candlelight.
“I’d give anything,” I said, not knowing that the words were there until I’d said them.
He smiled. “That won’t be necessary.”
I lifted the coffee cup and took a mouthful. The coffee was cold, greasy, more smell than taste. I could feel there was something else, something soft but solid; it brushed the roof of my mouth. I opened my lips and let the liquid fall back into the cup. A brown ring of coffee-residue stained the cup, a faint scum edged the liquid. A disc of grey-green mould floated on the surface. My stomach heaved and I pushed the cup away.
